Making sense (and, sometimes, nonsense) out of Current News, Issues, Politics

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

A Few Words for Colin Kaepernick

In this country, you can protest anything you want. It's your right. But, when you broadly brush all cops as pigs by wearing socks depicting a pig's head with a police cap, you force reasonable people to ignore whatever point you were trying to make. Those supposed pigs keep a lot of black citizens safe because, much of the crime is black on black in mostly black neighborhoods. Cops arrest 2-1/2 million blacks each year for a variety of offenses. Yet, for yourself, and those in the Black Lives Matter movement, the focus is always on a handful of incidents that go terribly wrong. There is no such thing as perfection when humans are involved. I doubt that you think you're perfection on the football field.

Then, there's your practice of sitting during the National Anthem and the presentation of the flag. Again, it is your right. But, again, you are broadly painting the entire country as, I guess, racist. You seem to forget that a million and a half of mostly white Union soldiers fought a civil war to end slavery; of which, nearly 600,000 were either killed, wounded, and went missing in order to do what was right. They fought that fight under the very flag you now disrespect.

You may be getting a lot attention at the moment. But, for me, and whatever it is that you think your cause is, it is falling on my now deaf ears. And, I think that it true for a lot of Americans.